Hello Everyone, Normally I don't 1

[zarney]

Hello Everyone,

Normally I don't want to update the last access ntfs time stamp every time that I visit a directory in XP Pro SP2 so I have the

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate

key set accordingly (dword:00000001).

Now I've discovered a reason that it would be good to have the last access time stamp turned on for one of my drive's partitions but keep it off on the rest of my drives and partitions. In a perfect world I would be able to change it easily via a setting for each drive/partition. If that all didn't make sense, I will try to explain it this way:

C: OFF
D: ON
E: OFF
F: OFF

My question: does anyone know if there is any way to accomplish this behavior or is it set-in-stone global across all drives/partitions as it appears to be?

Thank you for any advise!

 

[zarney]

Sorry about the freaked up subject line, sounds like I was trying to pick someone up at the singles bar 'Normally I don't do this but...'

 

[linney]

Without knowing if what you want is even possible because the HKLM key applies to All Users and All Hardware on the machine, if you knew when you were going to access D: then maybe all you can do is to reverse the Registry setting prior to that and apply it again afterward?

Can you do anything with a Virtual Machine inside of XP and run that when you want to use D:?

 

[zarney]

Thank you linney! I think that is a superb idea to monitor D: for access and reverse the setting afterwards.

I will write a utility that monitors windows system messages and when D: access is detected, flip the key's value, monitor for any other drive to be accessed and flip it back.

The more I think about it, the better your idea sounds. A star is born!

 

[linney]

Where that possibly falls down a bit is if you have to stick a reboot in for the Registry change to take effect?

 

[zarney]

Good point, I am not sure if a reboot is required for that one to take effect or not. I know that I read somewhere that certain keys that claim to need a reboot can be 'forced' to initialize by some sort of system refresh via the API. Sounds like a good weekend project either way. Thanks again linney!